Outlander Season 3 Is Probably Going To Premiere Late

Starz's Outlander is one of the most exciting programs on television right now. Fans can't get enough of the time travel series, but one of the biggest problems with the drama is expecting when to find it on the schedule. Starz split Season 1 into two installations and then fans waited another 11 months before Season 2 hit the schedule. Now it looks like we should expect Outlander to air late this year. Sam Heughan recently spoke out to explain that he is physically filming the series until next May. Here's what he had to say in a Facebook Live session:

We've just got two seasons commissioned for Outlander. We're doing 11 months. We finish end of May. And we'll be finishing in South Africa, which is pretty awesome. And then Season 4 will start not long after that.

Outlander is a logistical nightmare for the production team, but I'm assuming it would be a pretty fun series to act in, as the main cast often gets to visit a slew of different locations. This season, Sam Heughan reports to Harper's Bazaar the show is headed to South Africa, which sounds sweet, but because Voyager is such a dense book with so many location changes, Season 3 is going to take months to shoot. The series already started filming over the summer, but it won't be done filming until May. Usually in the aftermath, there's a ton of editing and post-production work to do. So it will likely be even longer before the actual episodes of Outlander live to see the light of day.

Since Outlander premiered its second season last April, if episodes don't finish filming until May, it's likely going to be over a year between seasons. There's always the chance that Outlander will go ahead and start airing the early episodes of Season 3 before production fully wraps up, but I get the shivers just thinking about the stress that could cause. We'll let you know as soon as Starz gives the series an official premiere date, but I wouldn't expect the new episodes to hit the schedule earlier than usual.

The good news? Starz recently renewedOutlander for two seasons, and Sam Heughan says that production on Season 4 will start right after Season 3 ends, which means the show will be working toward doing things more advance in the future. The good thing for Outlander is that the fans will stick with the show whether or whether not it appears on the schedule haphazardly. That's a trick most shows couldn't pull off, but as we said before, Outlander is just that good.